


Icicle

by EysabellePerfume



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-20
Updated: 2018-07-20
Packaged: 2019-06-13 12:38:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15364887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EysabellePerfume/pseuds/EysabellePerfume
Summary: Truth becomes very pure and very beautiful, as unbearably cold as an icicle against the tongue.





	Icicle

These are things that you think in those final seconds: I shot him, so I should take the bullet. I shot them, so I should take the bullet. Karma, and all that. Atonement. Because I didn't deserve John, and I didn't deserve Rosie, and to lose them both is justice. Anguish, because even though I didn't deserve them, I wanted them and loved them so desperately.

These are the things that you think when you are still alive.

But when that last breath leaks away through relaxed lips, and you find yourself standing outside of yourself, as it were, you understand everything. You know everything. You have graduated life, and with it, all of life's self-deceptions, rationalizations, delusions. There is nothing left to bargain with. There are no more scales to weigh one action against another. Truth becomes very pure and very beautiful, as unbearably cold as an icicle against the tongue.

John is false at heart, at least as far as women are concerned. He will be loyal to Sherlock, forgive Sherlock anything, but me he will forget. He had already begun before I'd even been shot. He will forget the next woman, and the next, and the next.

Rosie will be handed off to somebody, somewhere, until she's old enough for boarding school. She will experience her father as distant, distracted, superficially kind. She will know nothing about me, except for my absence. She will hate me in a non-specific way.

Sherlock will be Sherlock. This is his blessing. This is his curse. And the blessing and curse of the people who love him, in spite of it all.

Death is pure, watery, blue light. I sink into it, I stretch up into it. I dissolve until there is no "I," and no bubbles mark my passage.


End file.
